In the early days of mining, canaries were caged and taken underground by miners. They would die if the air was not good to breathe, which they often did, and the miners would come up for air. The canaries were lifesavers. What is happening in the Canary Islands?
The Tourism Panel on Climate Change commissioned me to write a paper on ‘Tourism in a Finite, Climate Challenged World’, published earlier this year it is a depressing read. We face a “polycrisis.” Jonathan Derbyshire, writing in the Financial Times, in January 2023, chose polycrisis as his “year in a word”. Defined: “Noun: collective term for interlocking and simultaneous crises of an environmental, geopolitical and economic nature.” He traced the coining of the word back to the late 1990s and the work of the “French social scientists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern, who employed it to describe the “interwoven and overlapping crises” facing humanity, especially in the ecological sphere.”
While climate change is our primary concern, and rightly so, our species now confronts an interlocking set of problems, a polycrisis, as we reach The Limits to Growth, (LTG) so accurately forecast by Meadows et al. in their Club of Rome Report in 1972. A 2014 research paper from the University of Melbourne’s Sustainable Society Institute, concluded “Regrettably, the alignment of data trends with the LTG dynamics indicates that the early stages of collapse could occur within a decade, or might even be underway. From a rational risk-based perspective, this suggests that we have squandered the past decades and that preparing for a collapsing global system could be even more important than trying to avoid collapse.”
In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report concluded that climate change is “widespread, rapid, and intensifying” and that the evidence demonstrating the role of human activity in causing global temperature rises is “unequivocal.” Later that year, at COP 26, tourism declared a Climate Emergency. Better late than never. Apparently, our sector had not been reading the broadsheets or paying attention to the IPCC.
We have known about the hard science of greenhouse gas emissions for a very long time. As early as 1856, American scientist Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated that water vapour and carbon dioxide absorb heat from solar radiation. In 1859, Irish physicist John Tyndall demonstrated that “when … heat is absorbed by the planet, it is so changed in quality that the rays emanating from the planet cannot get with the same freedom back into space. Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of solar heat; but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.”
The greenhouse effect had been discovered. We have known the consequences of our pollution of our atmosphere but failed to take necessary action to stop this form of pollution. We are still failing to act quickly enough, lazily preferring business as usual. We are balancing on a ‘doom loop’ pursuing business as usual, dismissing the effects of climate change as normal weather variability.
So, will we notice that the canary is dying as we heat our planet? Overtourism is perhaps the most stark and unavoidable “canary in the coal mine.”
Over the last decade, tourist arrivals to the Canaries have increased by 40% from 11.5 m to 16 m. The consequences have become intense: water shortages (golf courses, swimming pools and accommodation), food price inflation and housing shortages, with residents sleeping in their cars and, some say, caves. Canarias Se Agota called for a hunger strike and a human chain to make the strength of feeling clear to the government.
The Canary Islands are exhausted. The eleven people on hunger strike lasted 20 days from April 11. The protests have involved tens of thousands of people.
“Canarias tiene un límite” – The Canaries have a limit – are backed by environmental groups, including Greenpeace, WWF, Ecologists in Action, Friends of the Earth and SEO/Birdlife. There were smaller demonstrations in Madrid and Barcelona in support.
In 2023 13.9 million people visited the islands, which have a population of 2.2 million. Figures from Spain’s National Statistics Institute show that 33.8% of people in the Canaries are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, the highest proportion for any region except Andalucía. The housing situation and water shortages in many parts of the archipelago are also dire because of high prices, low wages, a lack of public housing and the continuing cost of living crisis, Víctor Martín, a spokesperson for the collective Canarias se Agota – The Canaries Have Had Enough explains “I realised we’d reached the limit when I saw people who were working as hotel maids or waiters were living in shacks. The problem isn’t the tourists,” he said. “It’s a model that was built around, and with the connivance of, a business class that doesn’t want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.”
“What we’re asking for is for no more development,” said filmmaker Felipe Ravina in a video explaining the protestors’ grievances. He said a moratorium on new tourism projects would give the Canary Islands a chance to reconsider their economic model. “Ironically, it is tourism itself which is destroying the very same product which it is selling,” he said.
There is also a polycrisis in Venice, where protesters point out that the daytrippers are not the major problem, “some locals say it is in fact overnight visitors who clog the narrow canals and streets with overnight suitcases and occupy beds that could otherwise provide affordable long-term rentals.”
“Lack of affordable, good quality housing has led to the exodus of the city population,” the protesters note, pointing out that on the first day registrations for the Venice entry check opened, 5,300 people registered to enter the city as second homeowners. Less than 50,000 permanent residents now live in Venice and the pressure on prices and housing stock are issues, locals say, which will not be resolved by the day tripper tax.
Data Appeal has published a review of the primary methods being used to manage the problem of overtourism: demarketing, limiting access, regulating behaviour, site hardening, and regulating short-term letting.
